Fuels and fuel suppliers

The 2 main types of fuel that are suitable for domestic use are wood pellets and logs

Wood Pellets

Wood pellets for biomass boilersThese are made from the waste from saw-mills and other wood industries. Premium grade pellets in the UK should be produced from pure wood with no contaminants. Due to their low moisture content, pellets burn very efficiently and quickly, meaning that boiler response time is fast, and they can be used in controllable automatic and clean-burning appliances. Plus because they are compressed, they take up less space than logs or woodchips.

You can find a list of over 70 wood pellet suppliers in the UK at the National Energy Foundation's ‘Logpile website':
http://www.nef.org.uk/logpile/fuelsuppliers/pelletsuppliers.asp

Logs

When buying logs for burning you should generally:

  1. Go for seasoned wood, i.e. wood that was felled at least one, but preferably two years before. This is because it will have a lower moisture content and burn better
  2. Go for denser hardwoods, because they have a higher calorific value and burn more slowly than soft woods like pine. Some of the best woods to burn are ash, beech, crab apple, hornbeam, hawthorn, wild cherry. Oak and elm can be difficult to burn because they are too dense
  3. Buy logs that are no more than 10cm thick, otherwise they will be harder to burn.
  4. Buy logs by volume rather than weight, because a lot of the weight of freshly cut wood is in fact water
    You should also make sure your wood comes from a sustainable source (in the UK this is very likely as overall forest cover is increasing

The National Energy Foundation has a database of wood suppliers. On their web-site you can search for suppliers nearest to you by following this link: http://www.bigbarn.co.uk/logpile/indexen.php

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